Patrick White

Yes, I Left You, Crying In The Nude Like Inspiration - Poem by Patrick White

Yes, I left you, crying in the nude like inspiration at the end of the driveway while the trees were tearing up a manuscript of leaves they’d written like silver Russian olives for the moon.

I could hear you trying to smudge my name like the misbegotten house of the zodiac from the blackboard of your teaching starmap several Magellenic Clouds down the dirt road swearing my first magnitude stars were all tinfoil not worth the light they were confederately printed on as I drove away like a space probe into the dark, trying to keep ahead of my own prophecyand never come back, no, never like a chimney spark to that smouldering fire that never broke into flame.

I wept in the smoke of your acrid oak that hissed and bubbled like spit from a cobra’s mouthlong enough. Go, little woman, like a landmine that thinks everybody’s dying to step on you all the time and have their arms and legs blown off listening to you apologize for not recognizing me even though I called out that night’s pass word, love, love, love as if I weren’t behind enemy lines, as you stitched my body parts back togetherlike a prickly pear or spiny sea urchin with a defensive attitude, trying to shine your best light on it like a candle in a concentration camp you held my feet to like birch bark and a funeral pyre of kindlingto the heat of your fireproof desire to be inflammable.

Yes, I left you, with your mouth gaping with incredulity like the larger land mammals at the end of the last ice age glorying in the freedom of their new found extinctionlike a Dyer wolf pack tired of howling at the moon that kept turning her back on them like lunatics that couldn’t carry a tune like that chip of a bluebird you carried on your shoulder to piss the world off.

The buzzing of innumerable onomatopoeic Tennysonian bees isn’t a guarantee that your locust trees are full of honey.Or the bulb of the moon you buried in my starmud like a prophetic skull you never wanted to listen to again was always the best judge of the daylilies that kept breaking into flame between us like a rootfire of unquenchable sex. Even when my lighthouses were turned thumbs down on the latest of our famous west coast shipwrecksI was only ever trying to put the torch of stars I bore for you out in a tarpit with the eyes of a volatile dragonto get you to spread your wings like a field firethat knew how to green the short straws of a scarecrow at a ghost dance that could rain on the ashes of everything we wanted to bring back to life again and again and again.

Because when you said yes to being loved, firefly, your light was inextinguishable and I could feel in my blood as I approached you like a heretic the axis mundi of the stake he was happy to immolated at like a Luna moth driven madby a female jinn enflamed by desire without smoke, a thousand buddhas regretting they ever escaped suffering by refusing to climb a ladder of thorns for the sake of the rose they uprooted like three wishes any one of which could annihilate you in joy wholly absorbed in the false dawn of nirvana the distinction was lost upon.

You could overwhelm my body at will from the inside out with the spell you cast on my blood like a hunter’s moonrise, a lotus unspoiled by the slum she was rooted in like enlightenment in a swamp of delusion where the snakes swallowed the frogs like koanshead first until all their cannibalistic taboos reversed the course of the curse and started speaking in tongues of serpent fire like kundalini haikus.

I bent the blade of my sword in tribute on the waters of lifeI had tempered it in like an igneous alloy of carbon and iron. Night and blood. The mysterious appeal of a woman in hell.Not so much dangerous because she was beautiful. But beautiful because she was a risk I had to take as she, for her sake, so an angel could fall from paradise and a demon could rise from the underworld of half-livesthat could look the light straight in the eyes like a black hole or full eclipse that was never the first to blinkwhen she spread her cowl like a Venus fly trap and began to dance like a wavelength for my prophetic skull.

More Orphic, I think, than Judaic-Christian served on a silver platter. I’ve always preferred to wane gibbously past my primelike a ghost returning to the scene of my lyrical dismembermentsto add a few light touches, metaphorically, like star sapphiresto the mystic ferocity of the dark desires in the eyes of the myth.